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I question the foundational assumptions which undergird this argument. Marxist and Communist and even liberal and neoliberal ideologies, which have varying claims of "the future is ours!" and "we will win in the future!" and "the world becomes more liberal over time!" have all made the rounds.
Every ideology and every movement makes claims of inevitability. Sure, Landianism also has a tinge of being darkly enlightened. "Our god, our religion, our ideology is better than YOUR ideology" is a key ingredient of every system of constructing national, social, individual, political identity.
Society will progress. Society will regress. Time moves on, and yet there is an idealized past being attempted to move back to, or an idealized future. There is no ideology that exists which doesn't also make meaningful claims about the future and its own inevitability. Latestage capitalism evokes this idea that capitalism will fall over because it's in the last stages of metastization. And yet. And yet it still hasn't fallen over.
The right tends to look back to a lost golden age that never truly existed, while the left tends to look to a future that never ends up the way they expect it to.
I think every civilization exists at some point in a lifecycle. Ibn Khaldun and Oswald Spengler thought as much. Investors have become interested in the economic shifts that play a role in it. Peter Turchin is trying to synthesize something that he thinks may be able to extract patterns out of the mess of history. Toynbee likely would've disagreed.
History is replete with examples of societies who were on top of the world at some point, representing economic and social and technological preeminence; only for the historical wrecking ball to come by and place them on the scrap heap of history. The same will happen in the US at some point, inevitably. I think we're playing a role in driving ourselves off that cliff. Incidentally, people have speculated (and I agree with them) that climate change will reduce the US to a regional power at best, that will no longer be able to sustain its status as the world's sole superpower.
How? The northern hemisphere is going to get a boost in crop yields.
The US will likely continue on its trajectory, losing power relative to the rest of the world, but not because of climate change.
I don't know how long your time horizon is, but I think it's just categorically wrong. In fact, it's one of the reasons why I moved out of California to a better area, primarily as a way to hedge against climate risk. Take it from Charlie Hall who pioneered the concept of EROEI. Also recommend the work of the world's leading heterodox economist, Steve Keen and his work on energy. In particular, listen to the episode "Economics and thermodynamics."
The world trends on energy, resource usage and ecological degradation I think tend to support the conclusion.
I think The EROEI crowd are peak oilers who couldn't accept that they lost and cooked up some new doomer nonsense.
You mean trends like this:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maize-production?country=~OWID_WRL
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agricultural-output-dollars
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-production
Are your beliefs falsifiable?
I mean I don't see any issues with the ROI concept itself. It's a bit of a tautology, but at least it gives us something quantitative that could be updated with new or better data.
In the case of agricultural production, the counterargument to your figures would be that recent increases in crop yields and the green revolution are dependent on artificial fertilizer produced by the Haber-Bosch process, which in turn is dependent on fossil fuel energy that has a decreasing ROI over time. This belief could be falsified by evidence that new sources of oil and natural gas (e.g. shale, tar sands, etc.) do not in fact have a lower ROI than older ones, that nuclear or renewable energy technologies are scalable to the same extent with similar or better returns, or that there are cheaper alternative sources of fertilizer.
The supposedly degradating EROEI has been going on for at least two centuries, and it has failed to affect the continuous growth of world pop and gdp/cap . An englishman in the 19th century may have had access to close-by and better-quality coal (anthracite) and oil , but if he put it in his car, babbage's computer or lamp, he would get far less out of it than we do. In other words, once mined, the return on his energy was terrible, hence why he was so much poorer than we are. As time advances, the mining eroei decrease (getting the energy) is more than compensated by the non-mining efficiency increase (spending the energy). So total EROEI (covering the entire process) is actually increasing.
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